From Trump to Grieg, a ‘Terrifying’ Soundscape

The actor and sound designer Ben Williams says he’s never been scared at a show. But he shudders as he recalls what happened one night in 1985, after watching “The Exorcist” on television as a 6-year-old.

“I had a dream watching my grandmother’s old green 1979 Oldsmobile going down the street and Linda Blair in the back seat spinning her head to turn around and watch me as it was going by,” said Mr. Williams, who has worked regularly with the Wooster Group and Elevator Repair Service. “I was more freaked out by what I dreamt than the movie itself.”

Despite that scare, Mr. Williams, 37, became a horror fan, a bona fide he brings to his body-rumbling sound design for “The Terrifying,” Julia Jarcho’s new nightmarish drama that runs through April 2 at the Abrons Arts Center. Inspired by the literary grotesquerie of the writer Nikolai Gogol and the gothic fright films of the British studio Hammer, the play is about an unseen, bloodthirsty monster who noisily eats its way through a village. Mr. Williams’s soundscape, some of which is improvised during each performance, surrounds the audience via speakers overhead and under the onstage risers, on which the audience sits, facing the auditorium.

“A lot of the sound design goes back and forth between creating a place that’s safe and soothing — Julia asked for moments where things seem really nice — and other moments with actual violence,” Mr. Williams said. “It’s a question of keeping it unpredictable.”

His design features a haunted house’s worth of sounds, including samples of vampire films, loops of Ms. Jarcho screaming and even a demonic-sounding President Trump. Mr. Williams said that he and Ms. Jarcho, who are frequent collaborators, did some “really fantastic homework” to come up with a macabre menu of sonic references.

“We asked: How do you take the creature-feature idea which has been explored to death in movies and how does that translate into the theater?” he said. “Is it possible to even do anything scary in the theater?”

Mr. Williams recently spoke about the elements that inspired four sound segments in the show.

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Pete Simpson, foreground, and Kristine Haruna Lee in“The Terrifying.”CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

The Woods and the ’80s

Here Mr. Williams aimed for a John Carpenter-like, ’80s synthesizer sound but with a less “commercial and comforting” edge. In addition to cicadas that Mr. Williams recorded in Ooltewah, Tenn., his native state, he took inspiration from avant-garde musical groups, including Shaking Ray Levis, a free improv combo that he has performed with; Coil, the experimental-industrial band known for its eerie compositions; and Sunn O))), “guys in the dark with robes playing one note for an hour in a wall of amplifiers,” as he put it.

The Voice of the Monster

Mr. Williams’s only guidance for this piece was Ms. Jarcho’s stage direction: “some sound from the 2016 election.” For this monstrous roar, Mr. Williams pitched down a clip of Donald J. Trump screaming “African-American” into a microphone at a presidential campaign appearance in Detroit. Mr. Williams stretched out the utterance and combined it with vocalizations of a howler monkey and a pig. “Every time he opened his mouth, it was the most hideous thing,” said Mr. Williams, who titled the clip “Trump Monster.”

Alec Empire - Pussy HeroinCreditVideo by downpath

The Composite Ghost Story

The voices of the actor Jess Barbagallo and about a half-dozen others — some speaking lines from the show and others shouting or whispering — overlap in creepy audio of “what surely are many, many, many victims screaming,” as Ms. Jarcho writes in her stage directions. Deep in the background, Mr. Williams mixed in a loop of a bass line from “Pussy Heroin,” a track on “Generation Star Wars,” a ’90s release by the German electronic musician and producer Alec Empire.

Romantic Notions

Mr. Williams said that the show was “very self-conscious as being in the horror genre, but calls back to the larger movement out of which horror originated, which is Romanticism.” At several points in the show, Mr. Williams uses a recording of the Romantic-era composer Edvard Grieg’s Sonata No. 3 for Violin and Piano in C minor (Op. 45), but with a sonic twist. “It has these running notes that go up and up,” Mr. Williams said. “Julia asked for moments that are more story time, bedtime, soothing sounds. I took that sonata and played it backward so that everything resolves.”